It’s pilgrim time, people… #vExpert #CLUS #TFD9 #rsts11

First, I’m honored and (at least) a little bit surprised to have been chosen as a VMware vExpert this year. To be in the company of both Scott Lowes, and several hundred other people who contribute to the VMware community, well, it’s an amazing category to be in.

I applied under the Evangelist Path because, while I work for a company that has more than a few VMware licenses, this is a category I qualify for under my own auspices. And the blog entries you’ve read, linked to, and followed in your own labs have been out of my own pocket and without benefit of a Fortune 100 company’s sway or budget.

Thanks to some of the benefits of the vExpert program, I expect to be able to expand my home lab and work on some new projects in the coming year, meet lots of new friends and cohorts, and contribute more of another voice to the VMware community. Although I suppose this means I should follow the recommended capitalization of VMware more consistently.

Speaking of pilgrims, I’ll be making a pilgrimage to Austin, Texas in just over three weeks to be a part of the All-Star All-Datacenter Tech Field Day 9. I know over half of the other delegates, having participated with them on previous field day events, and am looking forward to maybe remembering all of their names by the end of the week.

This is my first field day outside of Silicon Valley (unless you count the roundtables at Interop last month), so it should be interesting to actually have to go more than a 15 minute drive to join the rest of the delegates.

Tune in June 19-21 for live coverage of our conversations with Dell, Nutanix, Solarwinds, Veeam, Neverfail, Commvault, and a top secret stealth company I’m not allowed to name yet.

Update! As of June 4th, Infinio has outed themselves as the “top secret stealth company.” They describe themselves as “inventor of downloadable storage performance” (and I assume that’s storage performance enhancement that’s downloadable rather than being hardware). Looking forward to seeing what their Infinio Accelerator is and how it compares to other things on the market that sound like software-layer virtualization storage enhancement.

And speaking of pilgrims even more, well, I’ll at least be in the neighborhood of my employer’s largest campus when I head down to Orlando after TFD9 for the Cisco Live event.

I’ve been heavily involved in Cisco UCS for the past year and change, and am looking forward to exposure to more about Cisco’s datacenter platforms as well as maybe touching on other areas of their business. I probably won’t be able to turn my Cisco 1605R routers into SDN gear anytime soon, but I’ll survive.

And finally, as time permits I’m going to be evaluating and writing up a couple of SMB WAN load balancing solutions that have been introduced/enhanced recently. I had good conversations with two of the bigger names in SMB WAN aggregation and failover while at Interop earlier this month, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with some of their gear in the foreseeable future. You’ll probably see some of the names in my “How many Internets do you need?” post from March, and maybe a surprise or two if I’m lucky.

So stay tuned. And if there’s anything in the SMB (small/medium business) and/or POHU (psycho-overkill-home-user) market space you’re curious about, let me know and I’ll see if I can dig into it. Chime in on the comments below!